Majid Rafizadeh is an Iranian/Syrian Fulbright scholar, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Story highlights When I asked a Greek-Orthodox Christian Syrian man in Bab-Toma, Damascus, if he agreed with Bashar Al-Assad's socio-political policies he responded that he did not support Assad's oppressive security apparatus, but under his rule he and his family were able to freely attend church mass each Sunday and celebrate Christian holidays like Christmas each year. He followed up by saying that he had no assurance that any other sect in Syria would protect the Syrian-Christian community. In Syria there exists a diverse set of communities strongly bonded by language, region, religion, and ethnicity.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, the secret deal reached between the colonial British and French during World War I, partitioned the Middle East based on British and French interests rather than the interests of those living Alawites consider themselves Shia and are among the largest minorities in Syria in addition to Christians, among others[GALLO/GETTY] When I asked a Greek-Orthodox Christian Syrian man in Bab-Toma, Damascus, if he agreed with Bashar Al-Assad's socio-political policies he responded that he did not support Assad's oppressive security apparatus, but under his rule he and his family were able to freely attend church mass each Sunday and celebrate Christian holidays like Christmas each year. He followed up by saying that he had no assurance that any other sect in Syria would protect the Syrian-Christian community. In Syria there exists a diverse set of communities strongly bonded by language, region, religion, and ethnicity. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, the secret deal reached between the colonial British and French during World War I, partitioned the Middle East based on British and French interests rather than the interests of those living in Syria.

The result of the arbitrary divisions made the newly formed Syrian nation a highly ethnically and religiously diverse society - without establishing the governing institutions to harmoniously facilitate such a society. This arrangement led to decades of civil war and coup d'états in Syria until the iron-fisted Assad regime rose to power. Comprising Sunni Muslims, Christians, Alawites, Druze and Ismaelites, in no other country in the Middle East, except for Lebanon, do such a multiplicity of religious and ethnic groups co-exist. The Alawites or Nusayris, who number about 2,400,000, constitute Syria's largest religious minority. They mainly live along the coast in Latakia province, where they form more than 40 per cent of the rural population (the provincial capital, Latakia, itself is largely Sunni). The second largest minority are the Christians. Christian communities of Syria, which comprise about 10 per cent of the population, hail from both the Roman-Catholic and Protestant traditions. With the exception of the Armenians, most Christians in Syria are ethnically Arab.

Syrian Christians are generally urbanites; many live either in or around Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, or Latakia. In general, they are more urbanised than Muslims and they are in relatively higher income brackets. The Druze community constitutes five per cent of the population, making them the country's third largest religious minority. The overwhelming majority of Druze reside in Jabal al Arab, a rugged and mountainous region in southwestern Syria. Additionally, Syria has a very small Arabic-speaking Jewish community, as well as Yazidis who primarily live in the Jazirah and in Aleppo. After Syria gained independence in 1946, the various sects and groups living in the region (specifically in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Sweida and Latakia) attempted to gain power to protect their economic and legal rights. Sunni Aleppines competed for dominance with Sunni Damascenes in commercial and political life. The Druze remained solely loyal to the Druze, the Kurds to the Kurds, and tribal peoples to tribal institutions. Alawites, the largest minority group, rebelled against Sunni-Muslim control.

In the 1950s, there existed ten different cabinets with several coups and countercoups with four different constitutions. Syrian minorities were constantly insecure and frequently subjected to prosecution. The short-lived, pre-Assad regimes were mostly Sunni dominated and there was no considerable governmental protection provided to the Druze, Christian, Shias, Jews, and Alawites. In Syria, the Paris mandatory administration imposed a confessional system of parliamentary representation similar to that in Beirut, in which specific number of seats were allocated to Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, Druzes, Alawites, Circassians, Turkomans, and Jews. These ethnic and religious groups were guaranteed around 25 per cent of the parliament's 142 seats. Minority groups also protested what they believed to be an infringement on their legal and political rights. In 1950, they successfully prevented efforts by the Sunni Muslim president to declare Islam the official state religion of Syria. However, a 1953 bill finally abolished the communal system of parliamentary representation introduced by the French. Additionally, subsequent legislation eliminated separate jurisdictional rights in matters of personal and legal status which the French granted to certain minority groups during the French Mandate.

Successive Syrian administrations, including those of the Amin al-Hafez, Shokri al-Ghowatli and Shishkali governments, have attempted to create a unified Syrian national identity by eliminating the centrifugal effects of sectarianism. Despite these efforts, Syria's post-independence history was replete with conflict between minority groups and the central government - until President Hafez al-Assad came to power. To protect his sect, Assad implemented laws and policies to secure all minorities from the rule of any religious-majority ideology. The Baath party heavily opposed any inclusion of religion in matters of state. This policy against the rule-of-majority ideology culminated in the bloody 1982 massacre which aimed at eliminating the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement strongly opposed to Assad's radically secular and socialist regime. The secular socialism of the ruling Ba'ath (Arab Socialist Resurrection) Party de-emphasised Islam as a component of Syrian and Arab nationalism. However, Ba'ath ideology prescribed that non-Muslims respect Islam as their "national culture". In general, the Alawite communities in Latakia and Damascus, aside from key positions held by Alawites in the Syrian army, hold an important key to change.

However, the Alawites will need assurance that their communities will be secure if they are to join forces with Sunni Muslim activists opposing the Assad regime. Alawite religious and community leaders have attempted to reach out to Sunni religious figures - including leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood - in the past few months, to obtain assurances that their security and well-being will be protected in a post-Assad era. It is crucial that the Sunni opposition offer such promises, which would encourage the Alawites to join the revolt en masse. If the Sunni majority is to be able to reassure the Alawites and the other minorities - who believe they need the regime's protection - that they will not be subjected to acts of vengeance after Assad, their participation could significantly strengthen the revolution. Sunni religious and political leaders can save Syria from a potential sectarian-ethnic war. Two questions remain: Can Sunni leaders assure Syrian minorities that they will not face reprisals in a post-Assad Syria? And in doing so,can they prevent the current democratic revolts from descending into civil war? Majid Rafizadeh is an Iranian/Syrian Fulbright teaching scholar, currently conducting research at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is a columnist for Harvard International Review.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. Source: Al Jazeera The one map that shows why Syria is so complicated - The Washington Post The one map that shows why Syria is so complicated The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set! By Max Fisher By Max Fisher August 27, 2013 Each color represents an ethnic or religious group. (Dr. Michael Izady, Gulf/2000 Program at Columbia University, N.Y.) Now that the United States is strongly signaling that it will lead some form of limited offshore strikes against Syria in response to suspected chemical weapons attacks on civilians, one point you're going to hear repeated over and over about the country is that it's complicated. And that's no joke, as the above map helps to drive home.

The map, from Columbia University's really exceptional Gulf/2000 Project , shows the different ethnic and linguistic groups of the Levant, the part of the Middle East that's dominated by Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Each color represents a different group. As you can see, there are a lot of groups swirled together. There are enclaves, and there is overlap. Ethnic and linguistic breakdowns are just one part of Syria's complexity, of course. But they are a really important part. The country's largest group is shown in yellow, signifying ethnic Arabs who follow Sunni Islam, the largest sect of Islam. Shades of brown indicate ethnic Kurds, long oppressed in Syria, who have taken up arms against the regime. There are also Druze, a religious sect, Arab Christians, ethnic Armenians and others. Syria is run by Alawites, a minority sect of Islam whose members include President Bashar al-Assad and many in his inner circle. They're indicated in a greyish green, clustered near the Mediterranean coast. Although Alawites make up only 12 percent of the Syrian population, they are playing a crucial role in the war , fighting to prop up Assad's regime.

There are a couple of ways to think about what this map says about the Syrian civil war, beyond the strategic implications of where Assad is strongest (along the Alawite-heavy coast) and where he's weak (in the Kurdish regions, for example). The first is what you might call the Fareed Zakaria case for why Syria is imploding (he didn't invent this argument but is a major proponent). Zakaria starts with the premise that Syria, like many other Middle Eastern (and African) countries, has highly artificial borders that were created by European colonial powers. Those powers also tended to promote a minority and rule through it. This tactic badly exacerbated some preexisting sectarian tensions. It also forced countries into unsustainable power imbalances, with minorities ruling over majorities. That's not actually how Assad came into power -- his father seized it in a coup -- but Zakaria's thesis is that what we're seeing in Syria is in some ways the inevitable re-balancing of power along ethnic and religious lines, with the Sunni Arab majority retaking control from the Alawite minority. He compares the situation to post-2003 Iraq, when members of the Shiite majority violently took power from the Sunni minority that, under Saddam Hussein, had ruled them.

That would explain why so much of the killing in Syria has been along sectarian lines. It would also suggest that there's not much anyone can do to end the killing because, in his view, this is a painful but unstoppable process. The other way to look at this is that it's a war first and a sectarian conflict second. Religious and ethnic antagonisms have been around for many, many generations in the Levant, including Syria. Maybe what's happening is that the war began for political reasons -- people protesting dictatorship, the dictatorship overreaching in suppressing those protests by force, things spiraling out of control until it's civil war -- but that the fighting is causing people to retreat to sectarian identities and antagonisms, to make the old divisions deeper and more vicious. Sectarian conflict, after all, can have its own self-reinforcing logic: Alawites are bonding together in part because they fear, not without reason, that they'll be slaughtered in Sunni revenge killings if Assad loses. Sunnis see Alawite militias forming and thus perceive all Alawites as their enemies, so they start attacking members of that religious sect, which makes other Alawites more likely to form in-group militias. And on.

Of course, something as complicated as sectarian conflict in a country with many religious and ethnic groups could never really be defined by one neat theory. There are likely many different factors behind what's happening. But this map is a helpful way to start understanding it. The version up top is actually cropped; the full-size version is below. Click either to enlarge them. Click to enlarge. Each color represents an ethnic or religious group. (Michael Izady / The Gulf/2000 Project at Columbia University) world Who Supports Syrian Regime David McNew/Getty Images News/Getty Images 1. Domestic Supporters Religious Minorities Syria is a majority Sunni Muslim country, but President Assad belongs to the Alawite Muslim minority . Most Alawites rallied behind Assad when the Syrian uprising erupted in 2011. They now fear retaliation by Sunni Islamist rebel groups, tying the community’s fate even more closely to the survival of the regime. Assad also enjoys solid support from Syria’s other religious minorities, which had for decades enjoyed a relatively secure position under the secular regime of the ruling Baath Party.

Many in Syria’s Christian communities – and many secular Syrians from all religious backgrounds – fear this politically repressive but religiously tolerant dictatorship will be replaced by a Sunni Islamist regime that will discriminate against the minorities. Read more: Religion and Conflict in Syria Armed Forces The backbone of the Syrian state, the senior officers in the armed forces and the security apparatus have proven remarkably loyal to the Assad family. While thousands of soldiers deserted the army, the command and control hierarchy remained more or less intact. This is partly due to the stark predominance of Alawites and members of the Assad clan in the most sensitive command posts. In fact, Syria’s best equipped ground force, the 4th Armoured Division, is commanded by Assad’s brother Maher, and staffed almost exclusively with Alawites. Big Business & Public Sector Once a revolutionary movement, the ruling Baath Party has long evolved into a party of the Syrian establishment. The regime is supported by powerful merchant families whose loyalty is rewarded with state contracts and import/export licenses. Syria’s big business naturally prefers existing order to uncertain political change, and has by and large stayed away from the uprising.

There are wider social groups who have for years lived off state largesse, making them reluctant to turn against the regime even if they are privately critical of the corruption and police repression. This includes top public servants, labor and professional unions, and the state media. In fact, large sections of Syria’s urban middle class see Assad’s regime as the lesser evil than Syria’s divided opposition. Salah Malkawi/Getty Images Russia Russia’s support for the Syrian regime is motivated by extensive trade and military interests that go back to the Soviet era. Russia’s strategic interest in Syria centers on access to the Tartous port, Russia’s only navy outpost in the Mediterranean, but Moscow also has investments and weapons contracts with Damascus to protect. Iran The relationship between Iran and Syria is based on a unique convergence of interests. Iran and Syria resent the US influence in the Middle East, both have supported Palestinian resistance against Israel, and both had shared a bitter common enemy in the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Iran has backed Assad with shipments of oil and preferential trade agreements. It is widely believed that the regime in Tehran also provides Assad with military advice, training and weapons.

Hezbollah The Lebanese Shiite militia and political party is part of the so-called “Axis of Resistance”, an anti-Western alliance with Iran and Syria. The Syrian regime has for years facilitated the flow of Iranian weapons through its territory to bolster Hezbollah’s arsenal in the group’s confrontation with Israel. This supporting role from Damascus is now under threat should Assad fall, forcing Hezbollah to contemplate how deeply it should get involved in the civil war next door. In Spring 2013, Hezbollah confirmed presence of its fighters inside Syria , fighting alongside Syrian govt troops against the rebels. Syria: Inventing a Religious War | by Toby Matthiesen | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books Syria: Inventing a Religious War Toby Matthiesen Shawn Baldwin/Corbis Posters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, and Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah at the Sayyida Zainab shrine, Damascus, Syria, June 2006 Since late May, pictures of Hezbollah militants standing amid the ruins of al-Qusayr, the former Syrian rebel stronghold, have offered dramatic evidence of the extent to which foreign Shia fighters are shifting the course of the Syrian war.

To many observers, the Lebanese militia’s entry into the conflict has shown definitively that it has been a sectarian war from the outset. According to this view, Syria’s Alawite sect, to which the Assad clan and its security forces belong, is “quasi Shiite,” a fact which accounts for the government’s alliances to Iran and Hezbollah; while Syrian rebel forces are overwhelmingly dominated by the country’s aggrieved Sunni majority, now backed by the Sunni governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, along with various foreign Sunni jihadis. But Bashar al-Assad is head of an ostensibly secular Baathist regime and many Shia think that Alawites are heretics. Why exactly is Hezbollah getting involved, and is this conflict really rooted in religion? The answer to both these questions may lie in a suburb of Damascus called Sayyida Zainab, the site of an important Shia shrine and since the 1970s a haven for foreign Shia activists and migrants in Syria. Today, Hezbollah forces, along with Iraqi Shia fighters, defend the suburb.

Though the story of Sayyida Zainab is little known in the West, it may help explain why what began as a peaceful uprising against secular authoritarian rule in 2011 has increasingly become a war between Shia and Sunni that has engulfed much of the surrounding region. Sayyida Zainab—located some six miles to the southeast of central Damascus—is named after the daughter of the first Shia Imam, Ali Ibn Abi Talib. While Zainab is allegedly buried there (Sunnis believe she is buried in the large Sayyida Zainab mosque in Cairo), the site is less important in the Shia tradition than the shrines in Iraq and Iran. In fact Sayyida Zainab only became a site of mass pilgrimage in the 1980s and 1990s, when a large shrine was built around the tomb with Iranian support. By the time I did fieldwork there in 2008, however, the suburb of around 150,000 people had become a meeting ground for Shia from around the world.

During the summer months, the foreign Shia population would reach tens of thousands, with up to one million pilgrims visiting Sayyida Zainab every year. There were clerics and students from the Gulf, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and South-East Asia, among other places. Publishers of cultural and religious magazines from Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula were having late-night discussions in the bookshops opposite the shrine. Young religious students were sitting in the Hawza Zainabiyya, a large center for Shia religious study there, or in one of the other smaller religious schools reading and discussing with their mentors. Iranian pilgrims could pay with Iranian currency, their thousand-tuman notes with the iconic picture of Khomeini bundled in the hands of the street vendors. It was a world apart from the coffee houses and government buildings of central Damascus, where the old rhetoric of secular Arab nationalism still dominated, and at the time, I found it difficult to fathom the government’s reasons for allowing a suburb full of foreign religious students and clerics to flourish.

Most Syrians I met had never been to Sayyida Zainab, and whenever I told people I was going there, they advised me not to go, complaining about the Iranians and Iraqis living there and arguing that it didn’t belong to the Syria they knew. Only after the Syrian uprising began in 2011 did it become clear to me that Sayyida Zainab was a crucial part of the alliance with Iran and Arab Shia militias that has until now allowed the Assad regime to keep the upper hand in the civil war. In fact, the Syrian government had first discovered the strategic value of Sayyida Zainab back in the 1970s. When Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar al-Assad, became president in 1971, he was concerned about the legitimacy of his Alawite sect within Islam. While some Sunni scholars had issued fatwas recognizing the Alawites as Muslims, many senior Shia and Sunni clerics refused to do so.

Moreover, the Syrian constitution required the president to be a Muslim, and the country’s Sunnis, who make up just over 70 percent of the population, had become increasingly hostile toward the Alawites, who account for only some 10 percent. (The country also includes sizable populations of Christians and Kurds.) Hafez al-Assad found two Shia religious leaders, Musa al-Sadr, the Iranian-Lebanese cleric, and Hasan al-Shirazi, a descendant of a major Iraqi Shia religious family, who were willing to bestow recognition on the Alawite sect in exchange for Syrian patronage. Al-Sadr was given Syrian backing for the Amal Movement in Lebanon, the Shia Islamist organization he had founded; while al-Shirazi, whose political movement had come under severe repression by the Baathist regime in Baghdad, was offered a safe haven for his followers in Syria. In 1975, al-Shirazi established the Hawza Zainabbiya, the first Shia institution of learning in Sayyida Zainab. At that time Sayyida Zainab was still a small suburb of Damascus and the tomb of Zainab did not yet function as a major site of religious pilgrimage.

But the religious school, the Hawza Zainabiyya, grew over time and the importance of the suburb for the Shirazi movement increased after the Shirazis, many of whom had moved to Iran after the Iranian Revolution, fell out with the Iranians around 1983. Scores of Shirazis from all over the region, particularly the movement’s adherents in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, resettled in Sayyida Zainab. It was around this time that Syria began to forge links with Hezbollah, which had been created during the Lebanese Civil War by Lebanese Shia and a number of Iranian Revolutionary Guards to counter the Israeli presence in Lebanon. Since resistance to Israel was part of how the Assad regime maintained legitimacy, and Iranian assistance to Hezbollah had to flow through Syria, Hezbollah became a natural partner for Damascus.

(Although, in the mid- to late 1980s, Syrian forces in Lebanon also sided with the Amal movement against Hezbollah, reflecting the shifting nature of alliances during the Lebanese war.) Alaa Al-Marjani/Reuters/Corbis Iraqi Shia fighters salute the shrine of Sayyida Zainab, Damascus, Syria, May 25, 2013 Meanwhile, other senior Shia clerics such as Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Muhammad Hussayn Fadlallah, the late Lebanese Grand Ayatollah, and Iraqi Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi al-Mudarrisi established schools and offices in Sayyida Zeinab, and the Damascus suburb became an attractive destination for Shia from across the Middle East who could not go to the Iraqi shrines in Najaf or Kerbala, and who did not want to come under the influence of the Iranian government in Qum—the three most famous centers of Shia religious learning. In addition, thousands of Iraqi Shia settled in Sayyida Zainab after the failed Shia uprising in Iraq in 1991.

To Syrian opposition groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the foreign religious activity in Sayyida Zainab was proof that the Assad regime was teaming up with Iran and the region’s Shia to convert the Syrian population. While there was probably no truth to the conversion claims, it cannot be ignored that Sayyida Zainab had become a symbol of the Assad regime’s growing strategic alliance with the Shia—an alliance that has now been thrust into view with Hezbollah’s Syrian offensive this spring. In part, Hezbollah’s deployments—in al-Qusayr and other areas along the Lebanese border—have served to shore up its main area of influence, the Bekaa valley, the predominantly Shia home to Lebanon’s famous wine industry and the center of its hashish cultivation, and to reduce the flow of weapons to Syrian rebel groups. And yet, equally significant may be Hezbollah’s defense of the Sayyida Zainab shrine itself. The Damascus suburb is strategically located between the airport and the city center, and by holding on to it, the Assad regime has prevented the rebels from fully encircling the capital.

But it is now on the frontlines of the conflict, with rebel forces just a few blocks away, and many foreign and Syrian Shia have fled, fearful of growing attacks on the Shia population there. In May, Syrian rebels desecrated another Shia shrine outside of Damascus and exhumed the body of Hujr bin Adi, a historical figure revered by Shia Muslims, and Sunni jihadis have often stated that they want to destroy the shrine of Sayyida Zainab and drive the Shia out of the country. In recent weeks, the prominent Sunni Arab cleric al-Qaradawi, who is seen as the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and rose to fame through his show on al-Jazeera, has called upon all able Muslim men to join the fight in Syria against the Assad regime, Hezbollah, and the “heretics.” Al-Qaradawi, who had previously defended Hezbollah because of its fight against Israel, used the involvement of Hezbollah to justify his call upon all Sunnis to fight in Syria.

He even called Hezbollah, whose name means the “Party of God,” Hizb al-Shaytan, the “Party of the Devil.” Along with Lebanese Hezbollah, the fight for Sayyida Zainab has drawn a large number of Iraqi Shia fighters to Syria. The Iraqi recruits usually come from one of the Shia militias—including a splinter group of the Sadrists—that became notorious in the Iraqi civil war and in the fight against coalition troops in Iraq. Early on in the conflict a Shia militia, named the Abu Fadl al-Abbas brigade , was also formed to defend the shrine, and allegedly includes Syrian, Lebanese, and Iraqi members, as well as Iranian special forces. These foreign militias might have saved Sayyida Zainab for now, but they have helped turn the Syrian civil war even further into an international conflict. And by choosing to protect a Shia shrine city they have made a sectarian statement, giving support to their enemies’s claims that this is indeed a holy war. Not all Lebanese Shia leaders think it is smart that Hezbollah is tethering itself so closely to the Assad regime. Senior clerics like Hani Fahs and Ali al-Amin have called for a disassociation from the Syrian civil war.

Al-Amin has even stated that “Sayyida Zainab does not want bloodshed in the name of defending her shrine, but rather unity and shunning sedition.” And although the most popular Iraqi Shia Grand Ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, has not spoken out on this issue, he has told visitors that he is worried about non-Syrian Shia going to fight in Syria, as it might endanger the situation of the Shia in the whole region. Even in Iran, some reformists have criticized Iran’s support for the Assad regime and argue that Iran’s involvement will lead to a sectarian war . But these opinions are often suppressed. There are also religious leaders in the Gulf who refuse to see the conflict in a purely sectarian light. Ironically, these include revolutionaries who stand accused by their own governments of having incited sectarian hatred. The Saudi Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, for example, who is currently on trial in Saudi Arabia for calling for the downfall of the Saudi ruling family, has said the same about Assad, even though he himself was given refuge in Syria and taught in a religious school in Sayyida Zainab in the late 1980s.

But many other Gulf Shia support the defense of the shrine, not least because they spent their summer holidays there or have been involved in the transnational networks that moved through the suburb. Kuwaiti Shia investors, as well as Iranians, own hotels near the shrine, and many Gulf Shia own apartments there. Some of the foreign Shia fighters who travel to Syria might also be motivated by strong religious feelings about Zainab, or by a sense of religious duty to wage jihad against Sunni extremists. Lebanese and Iraqi Shia fighters who have already died in Syria are lauded at home as “martyrs in the defense of the holy shrines of Sayyida Zainab,” even if they were killed elsewhere in the conflict. The Shia fighters have started to resemble their Sunni compatriots, who travel to Syria to fight the “infidel” Assad regime. It might be tempting to view Shia fighters traveling to a foreign country to defend a religious shrine as the final realization of an age-old battle that started with the schism of Islam after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Such a simplistic reading is, however, deeply misleading.

Sayyida Zainab—a shrine whose status as a site of Shia religious pilgrimage was largely created in the 1980s and 1990s—lies at the heart of a strategic relationship between the Assad regime, Iran, and Arab Shia groups. This relationship uses religious symbols and sectarian language but it is driven far more by geo-strategic interests than faith. The various groups that profit from a further sectarianization of the conflict, this time on the Shia side, are to blame. These include Iran, which is trying to re-establish its influence over all Shia political movements and groups, whether in the Gulf, in Iraq or elsewhere. This is not a fight purely or even primarily about Islam; it is a war about the future of the Middle East. Unfortunately, however, all the talk about sectarian war is fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. And by misunderstanding the complicated history of Syria’s alliances with Shia groups, we may contribute to the very sectarian tensions that are tearing the region apart.

June 12, 2013, 3:02 pm Syria: Assad regime responsible for rise in religious sectarianism | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal Syria: Assad regime responsible for rise in religious sectarianism Alawite supporters of the Assad regime. Read more on Syria. By Michael Karadjis February 17, 2014 -- - Syrian Revolution Commentary and Analysis , posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission -- Much of the criticism of the Syrian resistance to the Bashar al-Assad regime is based on the fact that Sunni sectarianism has become an important element within it, in particular sectarianism against the Alawites, the sect to which Assad belongs. This criticism is justified, especially with reference to the extreme jihadist elements, but is also greatly exaggerated and generalised to unjustly cover all the resistance, which is also anti-sectarian in large part. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that there has been a gradual drift further towards sectarian discourse even among non-jihadist parts of the resistance. Often this is merely verbal, on the part of such groups, and (unlike the jihadist-sectarians) does not correspond to any propensity to engage in armed sectarian attacks.

But this very fact, of groups that seemingly have no history of or ideological dedication to sectarianism adopting sectarian language, raises the question of what is driving the sectarian dynamic of the struggle – a struggle that began in 2011 as an anti-sectarian democratic struggle to overthrow a tyranny. One of the answers most commonly given is that it has been driven by the sponsorship of parts of the resistance by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf states, who are supposedly driven to divert the democratic struggle into a sectarian Sunni-Shia conflict in order that the democratic spirit of the Arab Spring does not reach their own tyrannical regimes. This is certainly a factor, but a hard look at the reality forces me to say that this factor has been greatly exaggerated and misunderstood (including in some pieces I have written, e.g., ). One factor that has received not nearly enough discussion has been the role of the regime itself as the chief cause of sectarianism. As Gilbert Achcar wrote in a recent piece: Let us take Syria for example. It is obvious that the transformation of the armed forces by Hafez el-Assad into a Praetorian guard of the regime, based on minority religious sectarianism, was likely to feed sectarian rancours within the majority.

Let us imagine that the Egyptian president were Coptic Christian, that his family dominated the economy of the country, that three-quarters of the officers of the Egyptian army were also Coptic and that the elite corps of the Egyptian army were close to one hundred per cent Coptic. Would one be astonished to see “Muslim extremism” thriving in Egypt? Yet the proportion of Alawites in Syria is comparable with that of Copts in Egypt, that is to say approximately one tenth of the population ( ). Recently, in some discussion, Assad apologists have tried to tell me that the sectarian nature of the regime has been exaggerated, or is merely a reference to the religion of Assad himself. They point to the fact that there are a number of top positions occupied by Sunni (e.g., vice-president, foreign minister). For anyone in doubt, you ought to take a look at this map of the regime: . All the dark green are positions held by Alawites, light green Sunni and yellow "Others". First, don't be confused by most of the yellow -- nearly all of this is only yellow because it refers to businesses connected to the regime and so is only "other" in the sense that they are not individuals, and therefore cannot be given a sect.

The only regime individuals I can see that are "other" (presumably Christian, Druze or Shia?) are four positions. For the same reason, we can for the moment omit several dark green and light green squares which refer to regime-connected Alawite or Sunni businessmen, but who are not in the regime as such. Counting just the regime individuals, we find there are 23 Alawites, five Sunni and four "others". That is, Alawites, some 10-15 per cent of the population, occupy some 72 per cent of the regime. Sunni, some 75-80 per cent of the population, occupy under 16 per cent of the regime. The "others", with four positions, about 12 per cent, would be slightly, but not enormously, over-represented (though given the regime discourse that it is the protector of “minorities,” we could thus say that “minorities” make up 20-25 per cent of the population but 84 per cent of the regime, and the vast Sunni majority only 16 per cent of the regime). Then we need to look at other aspects.

First, a large part of the Alawite regime people are connected to Assad by family, so the regime is both sectarian and family run. Second, Alawite elements are absolutely dominant within the military and security elements of the regime -- including head of the Republican Guard, chief of staff of the armed forces, head of military intelligence, head of the air force intelligence, director of the National Security Bureau, head of presidential security. What this means is that the appointment of a few loyal Sunnis to the officially top positions -- defence minister and interior minister -- takes on the nature of being largely cosmetic, ceremonial. Third, looking now at all the yellow-coloured regime-connected businesses. These are of course the Syrian bourgeoisie -- the big bourgeoisie, who absolutely dominate the economy. They are connected via two main branches. All the top right of the chart shows large companies (oil, banking, telecom etc.) connected via Alawite, and Assad-family connected, members of the regime. This includes Assad's cousins, the Makhlouf family, who reportedly control some 40-60 per cent of the Syrian economy.

But of course, if the regime is absolutely Alawite dominated, where it can claim to be a little more "multicultural" in relation to the capitalist class -- you wouldn't want to exclude traditionally dominant big Sunni capital. So the whole bottom-right of the chart shows big businesses connected via the "Sunni business elite" who are in turn connected by marriage to Maher al-Assad, the president's brother and head of the Republican Guard (wow, talk about the state as the "bodies of armed men" defending the capitalist class -- hard to get it more open that that). So to the extent that the regime isn't entirely Alawite, it is the Sunni mega-capitalist class that is its chief non-Alawite support base. So now let's further summarise, the regime is: 1. Alawite sectarian 2. Assad family-run 3. The executive committee par-excellence of the Syrian mega-capitalist class.

So when an Alawite-sectarian regime that has ruled for decades launches unlimited war against its population who rise up for democratic rights, and the majority of the rising population (though by no means all of it) just happen to be Sunni, then Achcar is right that this “was likely to feed sectarian rancours within the majority”. And it works the other way as well. As Thomas Pierret explains: The kin-based/sectarian nature of the military is what allows the regime to be not merely "repressive", but to be able to wage a full-fledged war against its own population. Not against a neighboring state, an occupied people or a separatist minority, but against the majority of the population, including the inhabitants of the metropolitan area (i.e. Damascus and its suburbs). There are very few of such cases in modern history … No military that is reasonably representative of the population could do what the Syrian army did over the last two years, i.e. destroying most of the country's major cities, including large parts of the capital. You need a sectarian or ethnic divide that separates the core of the military from the target population.

Algeria went through a nasty civil war in the 1990s, and Algerian generals are ruthless people, but I do not think that the Algerian military ever used heavy artillery against one of the country's large cities ( ). But it is not only the presence of a totally sectarian regime waging war against its people that promotes a sectarian dynamic. It is also the fact that the regime early on set up sectarian Alawite militias (the Shabiha) to terrorise specifically Sunni populations, including through mass murder of hundreds of people at a time (the list is well known: Houla, Tremseh, Bayda and Banyas etc.), and ethnic cleansing, not to mention the wholesale destruction of districts and cities where Sunni live. To again quote Pierret: The problem is that many people do not even recognize the sectarian character of these atrocities, claiming that repression targets opponents from all sects, including Alawites. In fact ordinary repression does target opponents from all sects, but collective punishments (large-scale massacres, destruction of entire cities) are reserved for Sunnis, just like they were reserved for Iraqi Shiites and Kurds under Saddam Hussein.

A sectarian, anti-Alawite response is thus to be expected as much as we find anti-Jewish responses among many Palestinians (and check Hamas’ virulently anti-Jewish founding charter if you don’t believe me, largely based on the Protocols). I believe Hamas has moved on a great deal since its founding charter, and I don’t think this characterises its politics today. However, such discourse understandably remains a factor among many Palestinians, and the address for those responsible for this is in Tel Aviv. That of course does not make it alright. But the point of this contribution is not to justify real sectarian politics among some sections of the opposition, but to analyse its cause. A number of points can be made.

First, the fact that sectarian views have been rising among sections of the opposition, and that this had led to a number of actual sectarian attacks and crimes, and even at least one large-scale sectarian crime – the monstrous ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria group) attack on Alawite villages in Lattakia in August 2013, when nearly 200 were massacred ( ) – is evidence that the regime’s crimes are the major factor making life insecure for the Alawite masses, in the same way as the crimes of the Zionist regime occupying Palestine are the main factor making life insecure for the Jewish masses. Second, the massacre just referred to is the only one on that scale, i.e., on a similar scale to the kinds of massacres of Sunni that regime militias regularly carry out. That does not mean that smaller scale ones are OK. What it means is that, by and large, most sectarian attacks on Alawites by opposition forces have been opportunist attacks by undisciplined elements, not part of a strategy of any of the leading groups other than ISIS, and cannot be compared to the massacres organised by the regime.

It is also important to be aware of fake “sectarian massacre” stories spread by the regime, such as the alleged massacre of Shia villagers in Hatla in June 2013 (see ), the more recent faked “Adra massacre” (see and especially ), the alleged large-scale massacre of Kurds by jihadists last August (where the jihadists did carry out crimes in their war against the Kurds, but not of this nature or scale, see ), among others. As for Lattakia itself, ISIS is of course widely reviled by the rest of the opposition, who see it as either a front for the regime or a dictatorship that must also be fought, and since early January 2014 all the other resistance forces have been engaged in a frontal war on ISIS. Third, therefore, it is wrong to call the entire war a sectarian conflict or to call the entire anti-Assad uprising a sectarian uprising. In such a wide-ranging revolt against the murderous regime, there is a huge spectrum of opinions on everything. The task of supporters of the Syrian revolution is to do our best to support the best, anti-sectarian elements.

To take one example, the contrast between the ISIS-led massacre of Alawites last August, and this appeal by the local Free Syria Army (FSA) Battalions and Committees of the Sahel (Coast) in solidarity with Alawites in Lattakia who were waging their own struggle against the regime ( ), speaks volumes about the differences between elements of the opposition. This is also the case with many Islamist groups outside the jihadist-sectarian fringe, for example, Liwa al-Tawhid, the large moderate-Islamist militia that dominates Aleppo, makes a point of protecting Christians ( #axzz2gfb4z1J2 ). Indeed there are Alawite, Christian and Druze units of the FSA; here is an important article about anti-Assad Alawites: . Fourth, however, the fact of this sectarian aspect, even if only from part of the resistance, makes it all the more difficult for the Alawite masses – which, if we take out those in the ruling elite, are, like most Sunnis, often poor rural folk – to break with the regime and join the ranks of the revolution. Even many of those who despise the regime.

Of course this is a Catch-22 however – because to the extent that Alawites are seen to be blocking with a sectarian regime that it slaughtering the majority, anti-Alawite sectarianism will increase, whereas if a powerful anti-Assad group of Alawites did emerge, it would nullify such a trend. This adds weight to the view that a purely “military situation” is impossible, and that if some kind of ceasefire could be forced out of the regime, which allowed for the civil struggle to resume, it could be a good thing for the revolution if such space were used right. Finally, however, the fact that this sectarianism has been created, driven, perpetuated by the regime, also means that purely “diplomatic solutions” that aim to save the regime with some cosmetic changes will also not work – the chief cause of the cancer cannot be the “shield” against it, as some imagine. Both diplomacy and military struggle, like civil struggle, are tactics, parts of an overall “revolutionary solution”, which removes the regime.

Even to get to a ceasefire that aids the struggle – i.e., the opposite of one that merely allows the regime to go on killing behind a façade after the revolutionary forces have demobilised – will require not nice talk to a regime that has waged all-out, unlimited war for three years, but real military pressure on it via the opposition being able to get real arms in relevant quantities. And if we have to accept that at this stage part of the resistance has become sectarian due to the regime’s sectarianism, and that little can be done about it until the regime is removed, by the same token all the non-sectarian parts of the resistance need to wage a relentless struggle against the influence of this destructive, reactionary sectarianism within its ranks – the war currently being launched against the ISIS by the rest of the resistance being a very positive step in that direction. Religion and Conflict in Syria Religion and Conflict in Syria Religion and Conflict in Syria Is the Conflict in Syria a Religious War? Uriel Sinai/Getty Images News/Getty Images Middle East Issues Expert By Primoz Manfreda Religion plays an important role in the conflict in Syria.

A United Nations report in late 2012 said that the conflict was becoming “overtly sectarian” in some parts of the country, with Syria’s various religious communities finding themselves on the opposite sides of the fight between the government of President Bashar al-Assad and Syria’s fractured opposition. In depth: Syrian Civil War Explained Growing Religious Divide At its core, the civil war in Syria is not a religious conflict. The dividing line is one’s loyalty to the Assad’s government. However, some religious communities tend to be more supportive of the regime than the others, fuelling mutual suspicion and religious intolerance in many parts of the country. Syria is an Arab country with a Kurdish and Armenian minority. In term of religious identity, most of the Arab majority belongs to the Sunni branch of Islam , with several Muslim minority groups associated with the Shiite Islam. The Christians from different denominations represent at least 10% of the population. The emergence among the anti-government rebels of hardline Sunni Islamist militias fighting for an Islamic state has alienated the minorities. The outside interference from the Shiite Iran and the Sunni Saudi Arabia makes matter worse, feeding into the wider Sunni-Shiite tension in the Middle East.

The Cold War Between Iran and Saudi Arabia Alawites (around 12% of the population) President Bashar al-Assad belongs to the Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam specific to Syria (with small population pockets in Lebanon). The Assad family has been in power since 1970 and although it presided over a secular regime, many Syrians think Alawites have enjoyed privileged access to top government jobs and business opportunities. After the outbreak of the anti-government uprising in 2011, the vast majority of Alawites rallied behind the regime, fearful of discrimination if the Sunni majority came to power. Most of the top rank in the army and the intelligence services are Alawites, making the community as a whole closely identified with the government camp in the civil war. The Difference Between Alawites and Sunnis Sunni Muslim Arabs (up to 70%) A majority of Syrians are Sunni Arabs, but they are politically divided. True, most of the fighters in the opposition Free Syrian Army come from the Sunni provincial heartlands, and many Sunni Islamists don’t consider Alawites as real Muslims.

The armed confrontation between largely Sunni rebels and the Alawite-led government troops has led some observers to see Syria’s civil war as the conflict between Sunnis and Alawites. But it’s not that simple. Most of the regular government soldiers fighting the rebels are Sunni recruits (though thousands have defected to the opposition), and Sunnis hold leading positions in the government, the bureaucracy, the ruling Baath Party, and the business community. Some businessmen and middle class Sunnis support the regime because they want to protect their material interests. Many others are simply scared by the Islamist groups within the rebel movement, and don’t trust the opposition. In any case, the bedrock of support from sections of the Sunni community has been key to Assad’s survival. Al Qaeda in Syria: Al Nusra Front Christians (around 10%) The Arab Christian minority in Syria has enjoyed a relatively secure position under Assad, integrated by the regime’s secular nationalist ideology. Many Christians fear that this politically repressive but religiously tolerant dictatorship will be replaced by a Sunni Islamist regime that will discriminate against the minorities, pointing to the prosecution of Iraqi Christians by Islamist extremists after the fall of Saddam Hussein .

This has led the Christian establishment – the merchants, top bureaucrats and religious leaders – to support the government, or at least distance themselves from what they saw as a Sunni uprising in 2011. And although there are many Christians in the ranks of the political opposition, such as the Syrian National Coalition , and among the pro-democracy youth activists, some rebel groups now consider all Christians as collaborators with the regime. BBC: Syria war fuels Christian flight from Middle East The Druze & Ismailis (2-3%) The Druze and the Ismailis are two distinct Muslim minorities believed to have developed out of the Shiite branch of Islam. Much as other minorities, they fear that the regime’s potential downfall will give way to chaos and religious persecution. The reluctance of their leaders to join the opposition has often been interpreted as tacit support for Assad. Twelver Shiites While most Shiites in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon belong to the mainstream Twelver branch , this principal form of Shiite Islam is only a tiny minority in Syria, concentrated in parts of the capital Damascus. However, their numbers swelled after 2003 with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees during the Sunni-Shiite civil war in that country.

With Syria’s descent into conflict, some Shiites moved back to Iraq. Others organized militias to defend their neighborhoods from Sunni rebels, adding yet another layer to the fragmentation of Syria’s society.

Question: The ruling regime in Syria is dominated by which religious group?
Answer: THE ALAWITES